First screen, captured 21 hours ago. Hover to scroll the page, or open the video.

I refuse to accept a censored Internet. Join Me at FOSDEM 27

What HN thinks

A room full of hackers agreeing the internet is censored, then spending 200 comments arguing about who gets to do the censoring.

Infrastructure makes censorship inevitable
Any network runs over cables, spectrum and ISPs that governments and corporations control, so software alone can't create an uncensorable internet; mesh, lasers and radio are easy to detect or jam.
Mesh and overlay networks still help
LoRa meshes, Reticulum, Tor bridges and obfuscated VPNs make censorship costly and give people options, even if they don't fully defeat a determined state.
Moderation versus censorship debate
A long side-argument over whether platform moderation counts as censorship, whether government or corporate control is worse, and Reddit's political drift.

Consensus: No real consensus on politics, but most agree a fully uncensorable internet is unrealistic and that centralization by a few platforms and infrastructure owners is the core problem. FOSDEM itself got unanimous praise.

Recommended in the comments

Reticulum (tool): Recommended as a medium-agnostic, encryption-required alternative to the IP stack.
MeshCore (tool): Commenters say it works impressively well and has active regional networks.
Nomad Network (tool): Reported to work well over LoRa.
MoaV (tool): Built by a commenter in response to Iran's internet shutdowns to democratize VPN provisioning.
Tholian Warps ↗ (tool): Shared alongside practical obfuscation tricks like exfil protocols and padding.
Tor (tool): Cited as hard to take down and usable via unlisted bridges even where blocked.

Summarised by Claude from the comment thread 9 hours ago.

Points: 501
Comments: 242
Best rank: #2
Posted: 2026-10-25 by Tomte
Category: Security

fosdem censorship-circumvention digital-dissident-devroom privacy anonymity call-for-participation free-software

All captures:

Full page

Captured 21 hours ago. Click for the whole screenshot.

Looks similar

Screenshot of gyptazy.com: FOSDEM 2026 – Open-Source Conference in Brussels – Day#1 Recap

FOSDEM 2026 – Open-Source Conference in Brussels – Day#1 Recap (gyptazy.com)

245 points by yannick2k 8 months ago | 195 comments

Screenshot of anicetnougaret.fr: Postmortem: Co-founding a Web3 startup as a crypto skeptic young dev

Postmortem: Co-founding a Web3 startup as a crypto skeptic young dev (anicetnougaret.fr)

56 points by AnicetN 3 years ago | 41 comments

Screenshot of rselbach.com: Your app subscription is now my weekend project

Your app subscription is now my weekend project (rselbach.com)

501 points by robteix 9 months ago | 345 comments

Blog post by Roberto Selbach about replacing paid app subscriptions like Wispr Flow by vibecoding his own tools, such as a dictation app called Jabber.

vibe-coding ai-coding dictation wispr-flow